Friday, August 10, 2007

Not In Kansas

I have tornado dreams. Dreams where I see a funnel cloud in my rear view mirror and it follows me around corners. Dreams where I see the twister enter the building I am in and take an elevator to get to my floor. Dreams where the doorbell rings and, when I go to answer it, there is a 5 1/2 foot tall swirling black mass of cloud stuff waiting on the doorstep. In short, the tornado represents a malevolent force of nature which is impervious to rules and whose clutches, thus far, I have been able to just escape, but it may only be a matter of time before it gets me.

It makes some sense. I grew up hearing the National Weather Service tornado warnings for our area and was a junkie for documentaries about natural disasters. I remember trying to find an area of the country where a person could live safely and being disappointed that none of the places which appealed to me were completely immune to nature's wrath . Compared to the threats with which other areas had to contend (California? Earthquakes. Pacific Northwest? Volcanoes. New York City? Tidal waves.) I actually felt pretty lucky to be living where I did. My mom told me that tornadoes didn't ever hit Chicago because of Lake Michigan and then I heard somewhere that the skyscrapers actually made it hard for the weather conditions to remain stable enough to support a twister. And, the truth is, I have never actually experienced a tornado. I have seen clouds in the distance which looked like they were minutes away from developing into funnel clouds and I have headed to basements when the radio started to beep a warning. But the closest I have ever come to actually experiencing a tornado was one day last September when the air raid sirens went off and the local news said that people reported seeing a tornado in my neighborhood. Woohoo! These guys got something that day on video (though if there really was a tornado in my 'hood, it couldn't have been this one).

I gradually came to believe that tornadoes really weren't something which should concern me. Yeah, I had a strange anxiety dream now and then, but who doesn't?

However, it would appear that my sub conscious has been more in touch with things than I thought and, in the same way that animals "know" when an earthquake is imminent, it may have been trying to tell me something important.

So maybe the tornado in my dreams is not a metaphor for evil or a representation for everything over which I have no control, maybe the tornado is just a tornado and it is time to start digging a basement. After all, who would have thought a tornado would hit Brooklyn?